Sport: A Question of Definition

The fire was still in aging (59) Avery Brundage’s eyes when he got to London three weeks ago. Straight-laced Avery, boss of the U.S. Olympic Committee, glared at International Amateur Athletic Federation delegates from 23 nations and announced: “I am here under protest . . . the discussion of payments to athletes in my opinion is not consistent with amateurism and is out of order. … I challenge these proceedings.” The delegates squirmed a bit in their seats, then pigeonholed a proposal to pay athletes $4 a day during next year’s Olympic games, to be held just outside London, †

As usual, Avery Brundage’s crusade to keep dollars out of amateur sport got him small thanks. Canada was still calling him names because he virtually forced Skater Barbara Ann Scott to return a Buick the citizens of Ottawa gave her (TIME, May 19). Last week, when the Olympic Committee gathered in Stockholm, the Swedish press got in a few rounds of a favorite indoor game which anyone can play: putting pins in Brundage.

Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter labeled him an “apostle of hypocrisy,” and said that Brundage came from a land where a “top tennis player doesn’t go to a tournament for less than $500 to $800 . . . and their university sports are the world’s biggest amateur fraud.” Idrottsbladet got in a lick: “It took Our Lord 800,000,000 years to create the world of today. How long a time will it take Mr. Brundage to learn to understand it?” (Sweden was mad because its track heroes—Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson—had been barred from amateur ranks a year ago.)

Avery Brundage, a tough-hided zealot, ignored the attacks and occupied himself with one of his own favorite games—writing a new Olympic definition for the word “amateur.” In its final form, it read: “. . . one whose connection with sport is and has been solely for pleasure . . . and to whom sport is nothing more than recreation without financial gain of any kind, direct or indirect.”

Having approved this pious declaration in spite of all the hullabaloo, the committee went on to the next item of business: the question of Russia’s professional “amateurs.” Russia’s well-paid athletes will be forgiven all the subsidies they have already received from their Government, providing they take no more between now and the 1948 Olympics.

†The 1952 Olympic site, chosen last week: Helsinki.